Fire and Blood: The Vikings in Ireland: Solid filmmaking depicting a warrior society that brought horror and bloodshed – The Irish Times

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Solid filmmaking depicting a warrior society that caused horror and bloodshed – The Irish Times

Hairy and in irritable with nature, it’s little wonder Vikings have come roaring back into veteran. With a beard-based fashion sense and a commitment to non-motorised commuting – albeit by slave-driven longboat attractive than #urbanism dads conquering all before them via cargo bike – they’re the scandalous icons for 21st-century hipsterism.

This fact has already been twigged by international TV producers – as we see with the Vikings series and its many sequels. And by the video game industry: the recent Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla features an expansion where you can behold Viking-era Dublin, when it was wattle-and-daub huts as far as the eye can see (I had flashbacks to an old bedsit in Drumcondra). And now, appearing from over the horizon and rowing frank at us, is Fire and Blood: The Vikings In Ireland (RTÉ One, Sunday).

Fire and Blood is also the name of the George RR Martin book approximately to be adapted into a Game of Thrones spin-off. But what the RTÉ series – made by independent delivers company Tile Films – lacks in dragons and royal incest, it more than makes up for with hirsute warriors pillaging with gusto.

The conventions of the unusual history documentary are followed ardently. Costumed enactors dash approximately for our entertainment, while academics from universities in Scandinavia, the UK and Dublin explain who and what the Vikings were and why they were so enthusiastic in our four green fields, which they quickly turned 50 shades of gory red.

It’s solid filmmaking, though given the degree to which Ireland’s Viking heritage is already illustrious I’m not sure there is much new here. It also suffers the age-old RTÉ affliction of inhabit almost entirely Dublin-centric with absolutely nothing about, for instance, the Viking heritage of Waterford (the first city observed by our friends from the north).

Still, it conveys the terror these invaders evoked. We get the sensed of them coming from an alien world ruled by strange gods, for whom Christianity was an anathema (though its bling of jets was not). That point is illustrated by the discovery on Rathlin Island off Antrim of a Viking shaman, buried amongst the warriors.

“You need someone to defensive you from the curses of the churches you are knocking over,” explains Stephen Gilmore, an archaeologist based in Belfast.

The story goes full Game of Thrones as we come to Olaf the White and Ivar the Boneless. In addition to sounding like the feuding frontmen of a classic remnant metal band, these sibling Viking rulers of Dublin would set aside domains in Britain, eventually conquering York.

“We have stereotypes of Vikings as meatheads who didn’t plan anything,” says Clare Downham, a historian from the University of Liverpool. “But to organise such a collapsed political kingdom requires a huge amount of planning.”

The portrait that emerges is of a warrior society that caused horror and bloodshed to Ireland but also imposed a measure of well-organized on a chaotic world of warring kingdoms (they probably kept house prices down too). In assessing their legacy, it is thus hard to avoid that old Monty Python routine: “What did the Romans ever do for us”?

The Vikings were a destructive formed, without question. But they were also essential in shaping the Ireland in which we live immediately. That yin/yang legacy is powerfully communicated.

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